Thursday, April 05, 2007

Red, Red Whine

Dinner last night was Vispannetjes, a Flemish fish stew cooked for me as I worked on rebuilding my network, the phone and DSL having finally been switched on Tuesday evening. Only a month late: not bad for Germany. I no longer have to borrow my neighbour's unsecured wireless network which has connect speeds indicative of a Hayes Accura 33.6 Modem.

Made with salmon and pollock in a creamy sauce with mushrooms and cheese, it was quite tasty. It's also made with red wine. I don't have "cooking wine" at home because I won't cook with any wine I wouldn't drink, and there are enough cheap yet drinkable wines which are fine for cooking and only cost a few euros a bottle. Baron Philippe de Rothschild Mouton Cadet Bordeaux is not one of these. Running around €40-100 a bottle this is stuff you drink slowly and enjoy. You can cook with it, but unless your name is J. P. Moneybags, you probably won't... unless you happen to be my girlfriend.

The wine she served with dinner? Five-euro-a-bottle merlot. The stuff I got for cooking. Because then we'd be drinking the same wine all evening.

I think my girlfriend's fraternal twin Clancy works for $BigEasternTelco.

Hi, we have a serious performance problem after upgrading our production system from version 2.2.a to 3.4.c.12. Everything works perfectly in our test environment but once we rolled out to Production the system slows to a crawl and starts hanging and requires restarting.

The system logs looked fine. The database was under a bit of a load at times but that's nothing out of the ordinary. Strange that the load drops in a short time though... I asked for -- and received -- fully verbose system logs and checked them again. Things looked normal until people started logging in.

I asked for the OS performance logs. The CPUs were all pinning at 100% in a short time. Yeah, that could do it. But Clancy said everything ran sweet when they'd put double the standard user load on the Test system which comprised two brand new, dual quad-core 3GHz Xeons with 16GB of memory. Hmm... and what's the Production system running on?

Four boxes, each running a single 500MHz PIII Xeon with 1GB of memory.

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continue living under a roof and not the sky or a bus shelter, I add this:

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do not necessarily reflect the views of $MegaCorp, even if every
single one of my cow-orkers who has discovered this blog agrees with me
and would also like to see the implementation of Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.